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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24683296">A Clock That Falls Asleep</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaneki/pseuds/kaneki'>kaneki</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>League of Legends</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Pulsefire AU, Romance</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:27:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,512</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24683296</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaneki/pseuds/kaneki</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>They’d gotten better at it by now; catching the other when they’re least expecting it. Chasing whispers as they leaped from one dimension to another, faster, faster, before crashing to a halt.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ekko/Ezreal (League of Legends)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Clock That Falls Asleep</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Unravelling the stained ball of bandages he kept for emergencies like these, he started to make a hopeless attempt at wrapping it around his bloody thigh. Maybe rapid-fire jumping between dimensions just for fun wasn’t his best idea, sure, he’d be the first to admit it. Look both ways before crossing the street, and all that.</p><p>But, God, it <em>was</em> fun. Blinking in and out of random places with people he knew one iteration of but not another, looking into random scenes of these whole lives, fluttering through them like a picture book just to wave each page out into the sun. It was a rush he tried to space out, but too many days of trying to stay five steps ahead of the Remembrancers left him exhausted, and who’s to stop him from having a little fun?</p><p>From one world of water polo to another of cowboys—</p><p>Oh, well, yeah. It was the cowboys who stopped him. Flicking into the middle of a fight was enough to get his leg shot, and flicking out into some dark, empty study was not his first hospital-of-choice.</p><p>But the beach was nice before that. Places where the air feels dreamy and the sand soft under his shoes. For seconds at a time, it almost drew him in far enough, teasing him with such languid stillness. The whispers of water’s edge, teasing sandy edges of lands he couldn’t name if he tried. Holiday destinations, really. He could imagine the sort of money and maintenance that went into keeping places like those ready for hungry customers to buy their fill.</p><p>He could almost imagine friends of his doing it too. Not that they would ever, surely, they were too smart for it. But in the delusion of normality, he prodded at that idea too. Maybe they would like it, and those sorts of places were better with friends, rather than spent alone. Before the blink ran out, he looked down at the water, overflowing blue, washing over the murky greys of his worn boots. A smudge mark on a painting – when that blink ended, he was a little thankful his own interruption upon that world ended too.</p><p>Then he got shot and it was all downhill, but otherwise, a good day.</p><p>He’d collapsed to the floor, shutting down his suit before another one in a panic, trying to catch his breath all at the same time. He could feel warm blood starting to rush from the wound, and once the adrenaline of hysteria wore off, the desperate pain set in instead. In the dark of the room, he had fumbled around in his breastplate to find his supplies for these sorts of situations, not that the bead of moonlight pouring in offered much guidance, and the pain shooting through his body made it kind of hard to figure out the difference between a bandage and a poison vial. <em>Panic</em>. Was this it? Dying in the least glamourous way, on the floor of some nameless pencil pusher’s office? Ezreal crowded around himself against a block of something, pulling his knees up to his chest as he tried to hold his body together just so he could screw his head back on. He wanted to throw up, but whether that was the pain or the sick anxiety in the pit of his stomach, he couldn’t tell. It would have been nice to have Pearl calling him an idiot or even one of those Remembrancers saying some awful one-liner just to give him something else to focus on, but it was just him and the sound of his own breath, the tears crowning the corners of his eyes, the shuffling of papers underneath him, the smell of his own blood—</p><p>And suddenly – someone.</p><p>Laughter, too.</p><p>“Need a hand?” A voice – Ekko’s voice – from behind him.</p><p>They’d gotten better at it by now; catching the other when they’re least expecting it. Tight flickers in and out of each other’s world, never watching each other for longer than it would take a shaking child to snap their tongue away from a hot pan.</p><p>“You’re not exactly the best at this.”</p><p>Like a broken dam, the sickness drained out of him in one smooth breath. <em>Ekko</em>. Ekko was there, so he wasn’t going to die. His body ached and the pain still blared in a stubborn reminder that it existed, that it was so overwhelmingly real, but he wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t going to die. Ekko was here, so he was going to live.</p><p>Moving around what Ezreal assumed to be a desk behind him, Ekko stepped into the pin-light that crept through the window. Ezreal was sure neither of them was really meant to be there. He took a second. The room looked abandoned in a rush, but not empty – a clear sign of something going wrong. Underneath him, there must have been at least years’ worth of research scattered over the floor, but ink marks aged on rotting parchment by the restless sunlight ruined them all, just like that.</p><p><em>Crazy</em>, he thought to himself, like nothing had even happened. All that work just for <em>time</em> to wipe it away. Just for time itself to settle dust against the windows and let things pushed away on shelves be forgotten in the twists of daylight. Cruel, indeed. <em>Maybe time to send Lucian a job application</em> – he almost wanted to laugh.</p><p>Ekko was still standing front of him, looking at him in mild surprise.</p><p> </p><p><em>(On second thought, it made sense that Ekko was here. There was clearly something important in this room if the papers gave away nothing else, and there was always the bullet in his thigh too. Ekko had a core for a reason, even if Ezreal couldn’t understand why someone would need a better reason than, </em>‘It’s fun<em>,’ to start breaking the law.)</em></p><p> </p><p>Ezreal dropped his head down a little to meet his knee, meagre thoughts pressing against the front of his skull as he tried to outrun the urgency that his nerves begged of him. “Please,” he rasped, the pain raw and the blood coating his thermals still warm. The desk behind his hunched back was wooden – he heard the thud of his skull against it as he could feel Ekko’s shadow moving towards him, his body wanting to reach forwards, welcoming something resembling just a little medical care.</p><p>And Ekko, brilliant Ekko, who probably couldn’t perform life-saving surgery on a dying patient, but had just enough experience to save him, knelt. Brilliant Ekko, with eyes that Ezreal felt like he remembered every single, stupid day of the week. Ekko who seemed to haunt him despite being so Earth-shatteringly alive, literally just a couple of buttons away if Ezreal could ever bring himself to dial his number into the arm of his suit. Living Ekko, Ekko, Ekko, who seemed so constant all the time, the name following him in the shadows and in the beating light of the sun. Ringing through the air with each new breath.</p><p>Bending time, cruel, cruel time around him without breaking a sweat.</p><p>He eased the bandages out of Ezreal’s broken fingers, making quick work of pulling his leg out a little and pressing into the wound. “Come here,” he said, though it felt more like a suggestion, as he eased Ezreal’s hips forwards to lie his body down on the papers instead. Shuffling down uncomfortably, he sighed as his shoulders relaxed against the floor, while Ekko held his hand under the knee, urging his injured thigh to stay above the ground. He muttered, “Keep it over your heart, alright?” though it seemed less like a suggestion and more like a little secret he shouldn’t have heard, and maybe hadn’t at all. Blood-loss can do crazy things to a guy, probably – at least, Ezreal was pretty sure that in any other situation, the whole room would be a lot quieter, tenser, not colder, but something close to it.</p><p>Taking his cue, Ezreal closed his eyes as Ekko did <em>something</em> to his leg. Maybe removing the bullet pieces that he could, or trying to clean up the blood, or pulling his entire stomach out through it.</p><p>He didn’t know - didn’t really care to know either.</p><p>This was all a little too embarrassing for Ezreal’s tastes.</p><p>“Hurts?” Ekko asked, and Ezreal couldn’t see his face through his closed eyes. He could imagine Ekko was half-teasing him though, probably raising his eyebrow at him, like how he used to. “You’re pretty quiet.”</p><p>With the articulacy of a wounded animal, he let out a small grunt in response. Maybe Ekko was expecting him to be crying and begging right now, or just talking endlessly to supply something to the quiet shadows that watched their display, but nothing came to mind. He didn’t want to explain how he was, once again, in the wrong place in the wrong time, or how cowboys are kind of scary actually, or how Caitlyn is equally as crazy as a sheriff as she is in their world too. Each time he opened his mouth to offer the peanut gallery something, to take tension away that he wasn’t actually sure was there, it was silent.</p><p><em>God</em>, he felt like an idiot.</p><p>Ekko was still doing something to his leg, but with passing minutes, it felt nicer, less damp, and he could feel the bandage hugging tight around his skin. He was always good with his fingers, making quick nimble work of recombobulating spare parts into something new, or working meticulously on the smaller details of things. Almost the opposite of Ezreal, who couldn’t look in the same direction for half a minute before some falling dust caught his attention instead.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He felt Ekko’s hands come to a still suddenly, thumbs flattening – stroking – along the sides of the bandage, staying on either side of his wounded thigh all the same. “You’re good,” he supplied, as though he wished he wasn’t. “But I’m not always going to be in the next room you flash into, you know.”</p><p>Ezreal nodded without really listening. He was thankful that, this time, he was. He was thankful he got to see Ekko again before they both blinked away for who knows how long, and they were back to both existing as interruptions in moving worlds, seeing snapshots, pretending that it was an ideal way to live.</p><p>“I—I hear you,” he forced out through a smile, moving to prop himself up on his elbows just to meet his eyes. Ekko’s hands were still cupping his thigh like it was something delicate, and the shooting pain that Ezreal could only grind his teeth at almost confirmed the theory for him. “Put it on my tab?” He wanted to laugh to make the whole thing seem way less pathetic than it was.</p><p>He was sure Ekko could imagine how Ezreal would have liked it to have come out, instead of taking the croaked voice he offered. He couldn’t focus his vision properly on Ekko <em>(another glamourous side effect of blood-loss) </em>but watched as the white of his mohawk leant forwards, as Ekko pressed a kiss to his knee. A kiss that, if he hadn’t watched it happen, he wouldn’t believe it happened.</p><p>(Couldn’t believe it happened after it had.)</p><p>Maybe he died and his whole body had blown up into little parts, or the gunshot had knocked the entire limb off clean, and now he was living in some delirious recreation of his desperate fantasies. Never as linear as he wanted them to be, never indulging him as much as his dreams did.</p><p>He wanted, he wanted— Some ugly part of him wanted, still. Wanted to share the blue ocean that seemed almost overwhelming with still life with him, for just a moment. Wanted to press his forehead onto Ekko’s and just – just apologise. For what, he couldn’t pinpoint. There was probably a lot to apologise for: interactions that had already happened for Ekko, and Ezreal was still waiting on; horrible jokes and more IOUs he needed to pick up the slack on; this, mainly, right now. Such hideous want twisted in his chest, and he, barely staying awake, couldn’t find the energy to pull the right string out from under the glass figure.</p><p>He wondered how long it had been for Ekko. How much time fate had given before forcing another ugly imposition upon him? Long enough to forget about him, perhaps. Or short enough for the memory to be all too raw.</p><p>“You’ll be fine from here,” Ekko pretended to look up and down at the dressing again, tracing Ezreal’s leg down to his ankle. He moved to stand, peeling his hands off and stepping away, before typing something into his own suit. “You need anything else?” he threw back, like he was trying his best to pull away from this disaster before it gets any worse.</p><p>Ezreal shook his head slowly, arms begging for him to lie back down. Another paradox, another tick on his name for a thousand new years of punishment. For a second, he regretted it, imagining a world where Ekko wrapped a scarf around his neck before he left for class on a snowy day, a world where he ran his hand up Ekko’s arm before a big cooking competition, a world where he was one of a million fans watching a concert on his phone under his bedsheets. Reaching for something that didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, but probably did. Somewhere, for some iteration of himself he’d never be lucky enough to meet. He was born the passer-by, never the neighbour moving in, or the budding artist, or the new intern, fumbling through a linear existence. <em>Promise me this string of selves ends,</em> he wanted to mouth into the empty air, to the author of the papers under him written by someone far smarter than he was, to God, watching, listening, silent.</p><p>“I’m good,” he started, voice shaky, but he had the bullet to pin blame on for that. A world where they were lost in the icy outskirts of the ends of the world and had to stay together to survive just another day. “I’ll just wait it out here for a little, then I’ll move out.”</p><p>Ekko nodded, then gave him a mocking-salute, and it was almost as if they weren’t doing their pas de deux over and over again. The portal next to him opened, some bright world holding its arms open wide, ready to hold him tight. “You’ve got all the time in the world,” he laughed, and it seemed so genuine, and then he’s gone.</p><p> </p><p>Alone in the room, Ezreal swallowed. Swallowed the thought like it never happened, dropping from his elbows back down to rest his head on the papercraft floor. His suit would take a moment to warm back up again after the shutdown, he imagined, and as he waited for Pearl and her silky voice to ask him what the hell just happened, he waited in the dark silence, eyes trained on the empty ceiling.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>title taken from david horvitz's, 'proposals for clocks,' (2016) published by yvon lambert</p><p>the line 'promise me this string of selves ends,' takes inspiration from the final line from avni vyas' poem, 'minotaur's love song,' "tell me this string of selves ends in light." it is a sweet poem that i would recommend </p><p>thanks to allu for beta reading and also responding, 'the way you write like that (pointing at your ezreal ekko thing) but talk like that in casual conversation (poitning at your last sentence there) is so horrifying to me' to me when i described frank o'hara's, 'animals,' as 'pogchamp in a poem.' i would, however, recommend it for anyone looking for some further reading, because it reminds me a little of pulsefire ezko :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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